Tech Today: More Bad News from RIM

More Bad News from RIM: Turnaround still eludes Research in Motion. In its second quarter earnings call yesterday, RIM said that it shipped fewer BlackBerrys than it did for the same quarter last year, a first since 2002. Sales of its PlayBook tablets also tumbled, with sales half that of last quarter.

Will RIM make like H-P and offer its tablets at a marked discount? Some think so. RIM did not talk about discounts, but co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said that users can expect a bundle of features, including a video store and an app player for Android apps, to be made available soon. Currently the Playbook lacks many basic features such as native email.

There were some bright spots. RIM said that it has grown its subscriber base 40% year over year to 70 million. And the company is preparing to launch a phone powered by a new operating system early next year. [WSJ, AllThings D, Digits/WSJ]

Report: iPhone 5 Announcement Weeks Away: An Apple employee told the New York TImes that the company was weeks away from an Apple iPhone 5 announcement. The Times also reports that the iPhone will boast an eight-megapixal camera, an upgrade from the four megapixel camera on the iPhone 4, and that it will run on a faster a5 dual-core processor.

The blog 9to5 Mac takes it further, writing, that it has heard that two different iPhones are arriving next month.

Yesterday, phone accessory maker Case-Mate posted images of what appeared to be iPhone 5 cases, giving Apple watchers a first glimpse of the device’s tapered edges and slimmer profile. Case-Mate pulled the images down later in the day. [Bits/New York Times, 9to5 Mac, BoyGeniusReport, TechCrunch]

The Biggest IPO You Haven’t Heard Of: Beijing Jingdong Century Trading runs an Amazon-like site called 360buy.com. The company is gearing up to raise $5 billion in what could be the largest Internet IPO in history. [WSJ]

How Google Warps Time: Our methods for clocking a year aren’t perfect. Even atomic clocks need to be adjusted to account for fluctuations in Earth’s rotational speed. In a Google blog post, engineers explain how they tackle the challenge by actually lying to computers by a few milliseconds each day. [ReadWriteWeb, Google]

If You Already Hate Windows 8 Then You Hate Technology: Digits is still blown away by the positive press directed at the Windows 8 operating system. Have we entered some sort of parallel, bizarre universe? This post by Gizomodo takes the cake on the week’s coverage, not only calling the OS “fantastic,” but accusing the “Apple Taliban” of missing the point that a better Microsoft product is better for everyone. [Gizmodo]

How the ‘Cellular’ Phone Got Its Name: It goes back to the network. The Atlantic offers an explainer. [The Atlantic]